Xenofreak Nation (8 page)

Her face had been plastered all over the news, local, national and world. It seemed like every ‘before’ photo ever taken of her found its way onto the net. Holos Bryn hadn’t even known existed were posted on Holo Tube by supposed friends and school mates: Bryn with her hair in an updo at the Homecoming Dance, laughing and sipping sparkling cider, Bryn setting a school record in the 200-metre dash with her ponytail streaming out behind her, Bryn wearing a perky knit cap in a snowball fight at a popular sledding hill. She watched them over and over, wallowing in the miserable knowledge she’d never experience that kind of normalcy again.

Sometimes she found sites that weren’t so kind. More than one wannabe cartoonist had satirized her. One depicted her with a live porcupine perched on her head bossing her around; one superimposed her face over that of Pinhead from the old Hellraiser movies. The ignorant, hurtful comments below the cartoons were much worse. They called her ‘Porcubryn’ and ‘Porcubrain.’ They said she got what she deserved and that her father was the new Hitler.

He’d taken a leave of absence from work, ostensibly to care for her, but he’d spent the majority of his time fielding calls in his capacity as the head of the Pure Human Society. These calls had changed drastically from those he’d gotten before the kidnapping. Those were often from people looking for help and answers. Now they were from people offering to help—people who had political power, money or both.

Bryn was fine with all that. She didn’t really understand the politics behind it, but the more time her father spent wooing supporters, the less time he spent awkwardly attempting to console his daughter. If she heard one more analogy about making the best of a bad situation, she’d throw up.

Alone in her bedroom, she’d read up on the XBestias and Dr. Fournier. There weren’t any recent holos of him, just old photos from before he went off the grid. He looked the epitome of the average Joe: medium height, short dark hair, not fat, not thin. Like Ted Bundy, he was not unattractive, and had a reputation as a personable guy. Also like Bundy, he’d reportedly used his modest charisma to fool people into trusting him.

She’d spent some of her self-imposed isolation learning everything she could about porcupines. Given the dark brown color of the wooly undercoat and the yellowish quills, she figured her donor had been a common North American type, the kind she’d only ever seen before dead on the side of the road. Dr. Fournier had harvested the pelt carefully, as far as Bryn could tell, removing it from the donor’s shoulders on down so that when he attached it to her scalp, shorter quills formed her bangs and graduated to longer length in the back. It sickened her that he took such obvious pride in his work even when striking back at an enemy. The last thing she wanted to feel was gratitude, but the pelt, as hair, was esthetically pleasing in its own horrible way. Like everyone kept telling her, it could have been so much worse.

It would have been so much better if the quills didn’t poke her mercifully. She didn’t just look like a pincushion, she felt like one. Her neck and shoulders were a bloody mess. She’d begun wearing her leather jacket at all times just to protect her skin. The quills had taken their toll on her hands, too, especially during the phase of healing that itched. She wore her mother’s leather driving gloves until the urge to scratch faded and she no longer reached up automatically only to get a painful stab.

She read that a porcupine’s quills were used as a defense: when frightened, tiny muscles in the porcupine’s skin raised the quills, which then fell out easily if another animal came into contact with them. Bryn found that her quills were firmly entrenched even when she disturbed them. Her first instinct had been to pull them all out, but when she tried, it hurt like hell. As soon as she got up the courage to go out in public, she planned to head to the nearest hair salon and pay extra to get the ends snipped off each and every spine.

A knock sounded on her bedroom door and she automatically called, “Come in,” expecting her dad. Maria peeked in with a hopeful, apologetic look on her face.

“Happy birthday,” she said tentatively. She held up a wrapped box.

Bryn was mortified her father hadn’t warned her, hadn’t given her enough time to cover her head or change her clothes. She sat there on the bed in her grungy nightgown and leather jacket, speechless.

“Don’t be mad at your dad. We’ve been working on him all week and he finally caved because we showed up with gifts and begged him to let us in.”

“We?” Bryn asked weakly.

Maria pushed the door open and Bryn saw Kim grinning over her shoulder. “Those reporters are nosy, did you know that? Told ‘em my name was Sally Forth.”

Maria raised her hand. “Anita Man.”

There was nothing else to do. Bryn couldn’t hide in her room forever. “Nice to meet you.”

Kim was the less diplomatic of Bryn’s two best friends. She walked partially around the bed to get a good look at Bryn’s head from all angles.

“It looks awesome!”

“What?” Bryn felt like laughing and crying at the same time.

Maria sat on the bed and put her hand on Bryn’s arm. “It does. It’s totally you.”

Chapter Sixteen

There were seven people seated around the conference room table and one guard standing outside the door. Padme and Barney, both wearing businesslike suits for the occasion, sat next to their court-appointed counsel. Scott, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt, sat by Shasta, with Marcus Quick on his other side. The Assistant District Attorney had spent the last ten minutes trying to persuade defense counsel that it was in their clients’ best interest to cooperate in the investigation. He was having very little luck.

“I want the location of Fournier’s lab. This is your one chance at leniency and it expires in the next ten minutes,” he said. “I’ll leave you to discuss it.”

He signaled the guard and left the room. Across the table, Padme and Barney’s shared attorney began whispering to them behind her hand. Padme didn’t bother to lift her ear to hear.

To keep up appearances, Shasta, too, leaned over to speak quietly to Scott.

“She’s not going for it,” she said, referring to Padme and the deal they never expected her to take. “Are you ready?”

He shook his head, like he was rejecting whatever she said to him, but responded, “Yep.”

Under the table, she passed him the key to his handcuffs and pushed her chair back. “You’re going to regret this.” Her voice rang loudly enough for all to hear. She stood, turned her back on him, and moved toward the door, calling out, “Guard!”

The guard entered on cue, stun gun drawn. Scott was instantly up with his arm around Shasta’s neck, claws at her throat. The other attorney screamed and ducked under the table as Barney leapt to his feet. The guard swung around and fired, his one charge sinking into Barney’s chest and incapacitating him with a high-voltage jolt. Padme scrambled out of the way, around the table behind Scott, who threw Shasta to the floor and laid the guard out with one punch.

The guard’s body blocked the door open and Scott leaned out to look up and down the hallway. No one in sight, as planned. To Shasta, he growled, “Which way is out?”

She was good; her terrified victim imitation would have fooled him if he didn’t know it was an act. “Right,” she said. “Turn right. But you’ll never get away.”

He bent and snatched her ID from where it was clipped to her shirt. “Purse,” he snapped. Shasta handed him her purse, hand shaking.

He turned to Padme. “Coming?”

She looked flabbergasted, but nodded.

He rolled the guard’s body into the conference room and the door shut and automatically locked. Almost immediately they heard muffled banging and shouting from inside. They turned right down the corridor, unimpeded. Ten yards away was a door marked ‘Exit.’ Scott swiped Shasta’s ID through the card reader and opened the door onto a parking lot.

“That was too easy,” he said, looking all around.

“I agree.” Padme squinted in the unaccustomed sunshine. There were people in the distance, but no one noticed the fugitives as they walked quickly away from the building.

Scott rummaged in Shasta’s purse and pulled out her keypad. “Damn it. Password.”

“Here.” Padme grabbed it, snapped the back off and poked around inside, still walking. Scott had been counting on this. Late model Toyota keypads were notoriously easy to hack into and Padme had shown herself in the past to be handy in a technological pinch.

She turned the keypad and tapped some numbers with her thumbs. Several cars down, a black Camry II beeped. She looked up at Scott and grinned.

He drove.

“I’ll bet you a million bucks we’re being tracked,” he said as he turned out of the parking lot onto the street.

“It seems likely. How did you get out of your handcuffs?”

Scott raised his right hand and extended his forefinger claw. “Picked it.”

“We should ditch the car and split up,” she said.

He nodded, even though the plan was for him to stick to her like glue. “Where’d you want me to drop you?”

She didn’t answer, so he glanced at her. She was looking at him with a mixture of distrust and something else. Pity maybe? Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. She’d already given him notice that he wasn’t trusted. Nothing about their ‘escape’ had rung true. There was only one thing he could think of that might erase that look from her face.

He turned onto a residential street and parked. Shasta’s wallet quite conveniently had several hundred dollars cash in it. He handed Padme half, slipped Shasta’s phone into his pocket and without a word got out of the car and started walking. Every step took him further and further away from his duty. He didn’t look back until he got to the end of the block.

She was right behind him.

Chapter Seventeen

It only took Bryn about ten attempts to change the subject before Kim stopped trying to discuss the kidnapping. Not that Bryn didn’t necessarily want to talk about it—she couldn’t.

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” she parroted Mr. Quick, the stiff, prissy prosecutor who’d met with her and her father several times. “I’m not allowed to say anything.”

Kim finally got the message and the girls dug out Bryn’s yearbook and began rehashing their senior year highlights. Bryn knew it was supposed to cheer her up, so she did her best to laugh in all the right places, but she couldn’t shake a pervasive, disassociated feeling, like the girl in the yearbook was someone else. Like there was an acrylic bubble separating her from the past.

Maria reached for another of the birthday chocolates she’d brought and said, “Oh! Did you hear about Paul?”

“Do I want to?” Bryn asked.

Paul, the ex. She’d thought about him when she’d touched Nurse Nancy’s fur beard. Would she ever be able to think of Paul again without remembering that grimy exam room and the stench of the Warehouse? Without thinking about how shocked Scott’s face looked when she’d begun screaming?

“Sheila’s pregnant,” Kim blurted.

That made Bryn laugh, the first genuine one she’d produced in weeks. “Oh, my gosh, that’s exactly perfect. Are they getting married?”

“Are you kidding? He’s going around telling everyone he’s having a paternity test done. What a jerk.” Maria had never liked him, which had been a sore subject between she and Bryn even a year later, but not now. Bryn found she no longer cared the smallest bit what happened to Paul.

The bedroom door suddenly opened and her father barged in. He always knocked, so right away she knew something was wrong. Without any preamble, he said, “Turn on the holovision.”

She reached for the remote and at her father’s direction, tuned her small H.V. to a local news channel. Whatever he’d wanted to show her had ended and now a commercial for an electric Harley Davidson motorcycle was playing, so he took the remote out of her hand and began switching channels.

“There,” he said. An older man sat at a news desk with a recent picture of Bryn superimposed behind him. She’d never seen the shot before; none of the ‘after’ pictures of her were supposed to have been released. It showed her resting her chin in her gloved hands with a pensive look on her face and a faraway look in her eyes, porcupine quills sticking out of her head every-which-way.

“Where’d they get that picture?” she asked.

“Just listen.”

The newscaster was saying something about the case. “…in broad daylight and forced to undergo a xenotransplant. Three of the four wanted kidnappers were in custody until this morning when two of them, Scott Harding and Padme Lango,” the picture behind him changed to side-by-side mug shots, “assaulted a security guard and escaped just hours ago from a low-security federal facility. Police are advising the public to take extreme caution and to consider the pair armed and dangerous.”

Bryn was outraged, but not so much that she didn’t notice a couple of shocking details.

“That’s not Scott! And Padme has cow ears!” The photos were close enough likenesses, but the one that was supposed to be Scott looked like a hardened criminal a decade his senior and the one of “Padme” had perfect, shell-like human ears. Bryn looked at her father and stated emphatically, “They have the wrong pictures.”